Call centers provide a wide array of services for customers of the companies that use them. Through a call center, a company can service customers around the world, around the clock. The essence of call center effectiveness and efficiency, however, is the performance of the call center service representatives or agents that serve the calling customers. Call center supervisors manage call service representatives and are responsible for monitoring their performance. Call center supervisors may monitor service representatives' calls for three reasons: (1) to provide training to the customer service representatives, (2) to assure the quality of customer service, and (3) to maintain security within the company.
For a call center that uses an automatic call distributor (ACD), private branch exchange (PBX), or other suitable routing device, there typically exist features that are integral to the ACD that enable monitoring of service representative performance. These capabilities, however, are generally manual and have significant limitations. With other demands on their time and attention, supervisors may not be consistent or equitable in the ways that they monitor each agent. These inconsistencies and inequities may result in a supervisor monitoring an agent either for too little time or too much time, or too infrequently or too frequently. This may cause an imbalance in the supervisor's perception of an agent relative to other agents in the call center.
Another problem that manual scheduling and monitoring of agents causes is increased time pressure on the supervisors themselves. For example, they must remember who has been monitored, for how long they have monitored or intend to monitor an agent, and when to monitor the agent. If a call center has numerous service representatives, the requirement to monitor the performance of these agents may seriously and adversely affect the productivity of the call center supervisor. This is because the task of monitoring agents is only one of many tasks that the supervisor must perform.